ZOOM | SUMMER 2023

the sunshine coast magazine
I love my small town streets, the fading facades and how sunset
lights up shop windows, redirecting shadows and illuminating
hidden passages. I love the forest and mountains that lurk
beyond our backyards, sheltering a multitude of lives and
mysteries, and I love the ocean at my feet, with its ever-changing
moods and colours. With my paintings, I try to explode these
sensations of wonder, beyond representation of the actual thing
or place. I bring in graphic devices that flip the perspective from
day into night or from above to below, and use the delineation
between shapes to frame views of possible, simultaneous
realities. I draw from a growing roster of symbolic shapes to add
explanation and narrative to these exploded views. Triangles
can represent trees or tents. Bottle shapes imitate towers or
smokestacks. Anthropomorphized forms represent feelings or
community, returning the gaze of the viewer.
The daughter of an artist and an underground miner, I grew up in
northern Canada trying to reconcile two realities - one where the
land is to be worshipped and memorized in art, one where the
land exists to be cut up and sold. I currently reside in the qathet
Regional District, on the traditional territory of the Tla’amin
Nation on the Sunshine Coast. ·
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“Meghan is very much aware of the structure of painting in
terms of space and colour, moving with confidence between
the abstraction of surface and the illusion of depth embodied
in the work to serve the lively content. She accomplishes
this with fresh innovations for each work, and although her
presence in undeniable, there is no sense of mere repetition
but rather continuous expansion of symbolic ideas.”
Norman Yates, Canadian painter and mentor
EXPLORE AND ACQUIRE MEGHAN’S ARTWORK ONLINE AT MEGHANHILDEBRAND.COM.
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